A question of Faith.

I wrote this letter to Andrew Sullivan recently, regarding a post that was a reader's response to an ongoing dialogue between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, book author, intellectual, atheist. I doubt Andrew sullivan would answer my email, but in any case, my questions were genuine, and so I post them here. You can go here to read the AS post that inspired my response.
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Dear Andrew,

I am an avid reader of your blog. I am also a person of no particular faith tradition, having been raised Buddhist but without parental compulsion to practice it. I, however, have a Catholic boyfriend, and while I do not understand his devotion, I deeply respect it. It is with this general outsider perspective that I feel compelled to respond to several points in the reader's email regarding Sam Harris that you have posted.

Your reader is right. Religious books are not just books. Rather, they seek to offer guidance on how to conduct a virtuous life. They are moral texts. However, this says essentially nothing about their origins. Humans have been writing moral texts about the nature, the mystery, if you will, of life since the beginning of recorded history. Many gods and goddesses have come and go, and we today largely relegate these figures to the realm of myths. What primarily differentiate religious texts from nonreligious ones is a reflexive reliance on the supernatural to lend credence and power to particular moral systems. The question thus remains: why rely on the divine? Is it because the Judeo-Christian's 'God is Truth' as you say, or is it because invoking the divine can do so much: help enforce moral points, assuage human fears of the unknown, provide a sense of collective identity...etc?

One should not doubt the power of these books to change lives, to structure moral behaviors, to beget civilizations. But these are all end products of religion that, again, do not answer Harris' central assertion: Why couldn't it all be bogus? Clever human solutions for human concerns? As your reader claimed, most of us need religion to show us 'proper conduct' based on 'very old traditions'. But if anything, this need lends Harris' suggestion of an earthly origin for all religions even more weight. Just because something is old doesn't make it right or supernatural. If most other 'ways of knowing', to use a Harvard coinage for general education, are undoubtedly products of human curiosity and our desire to understand, why not also religion?

Moreover, to dismiss the charge that writers of religious texts are 'regular guys', as the reader tried to do, is avoiding the issue. While I agree that they are not merely regular guys in the sense that anybody can fill their shoes, the possibility exists for their inspirations to be earthly, not godly. First, the human population bell curve certainly allows for outliers with extraordinary intellects like Newton and Einstein, and religious writers of old are probably of a similar lot. By most accounts, Einstein was not divinely inspired; why couldn't this also be true for religious writers? Second, assuming that religious writers felt ecstatic exhilarations they interpreted as divine inspirations, there is little external proof to let us know that such ecstasy is, indeed, 'of the Spirit'. Essentially, those of us who are not religious must take these writers, and by extension all religious persons, at their word. The question remains to be why, and in today's global climate of competing religious systems all claiming to know Truth while threatening to tear the world apart with ideological differences, can we afford to?

Going back to the practical benefits of religion, I fully empathize with the reader for commenting that nonreligious moral philosophies do not seem to help us navigate everyday life. Ignoring the problem of jargon and non-intuitive, highly abstract arguments commonplace within contemporary philosophical discourse for just a moment, these philosophical models are fundamentally scary for most of us in their general supposition and acceptance that we are free moral agents (to a great extent) without anybody above. By suggesting that human existence stands always at the brink of oblivion--with no afterlife, no external judgments or punishments for virtue or vice at the end of time--the question of why we should lead an ethical life, whatever that means, becomes very troubling. However, it can be simultaneously exhilarating, liberating even. An answer that includes a self-imposed responsibility for decency, kindness, and virtue, irrespective of cosmic rewards, is, at the end of the day, the formation of a personal moral compass and the beginning of an ethical life. While religion may claim this compass to be a gift of 'God', a hypothesis of human origins for such a phenomenon represents, for some, the true ecstasy of existence.


With great respect,
PLN